'Schoolgirl' - in a school of very hard knocks
STEPHANIE SALTER, SF EXAMINER COLUMNIST (mailto:ssalter@sfchronicle.com)
THE BRIGHT mid-day sun did not enhance the naughty school-girl masquerade she was offering for sale. Her sunken eyes were highlighted. So were the lines around her mouth and the small sores on her skinny forearms. Despite little white ankle socks and high heels, a short skirt and girlish blouse, she looked as if she were at least 50. Which means she is probably not yet 30. Being a street prostitute has a way of aging a woman, fast.
As I watched her - standing on a corner of South Van Ness Avenue, looking anxiously up and down the block for johns as well as cops - I remembered a story I'd read recently about a pair of "wild and crazy" Russians in San Francisco. Featured in The Examiner's popular column, "The Night Cabbie," the men from Moscow had flagged down a taxi and informed the driver that they wanted to go "where we can take a good look at the hookers."
Loaded with booze and cash, the men complained about the quality of San Francisco prostitutes.
"We want some pretty ones like the ones we have back in Moscow," said the more loquacious of the pair. They further amused the night cabbie by telling him about a friend of theirs who makes his living flying Americans to Moscow for "10-day blitzes with all the women they ever dreamed of."
I thought about the grim economic conditions that exist for millions of Russians these days, about the widespread unemployment, the rise in organized crime and the increased trafficking of women and girls for sex.
Funny how it always works: The meaner and dirtier the economic times, the prettier (and younger) are the females who turn to selling their bodies to live.
I thought, too, about a recent newsletter from the Rev. Glenda Hope, director of San Francisco Network Ministries and co-founder of SafeHouse for Women Leaving Prostitution. An extended-stay residential, rehab and life-skills facility for former prostitutes, the SafeHouse is 2 1/2 years old and one of only five such residential programs in the country.
"And with only 10 beds is the largest," wrote Hope. As for the makeup of the residents, all are recovering from alcohol or drug addiction and more than half are high school dropouts.
"At least 70 percent suffered long-term child abuse, including incest and child prostitution. Some manifest significant cognitive impairment caused in utero or by blows to the head."
Perhaps the most chilling statistic of all: "The average age for a female entering prostitution in the USA is 14." An ordained Presbyterian minister (and one-time Southern Baptist), Hope told me not long ago that people are always asking her why she now devotes so much of her ministry to prostitutes.
"They ask me, 'What is it about these women?' Well, it's because I don't see them as criminals or moral outcasts. I see them as sisters," she said.
"And I see the situation they're in as an extension of the stereotyping and thoughtlessness that all women are subjected to, as a revelation of the worst of what a patriarchal culture has done to women and children."
In her work with SafeHouse, Hope frequently teams up with Norma Hotaling, a former prostitute who now directs an outreach and advocacy program called S.A.G.E., Standing Against Global Exploitation.
Hotaling has just secured a building that will serve as an emergency shelter for prostitutes who are literally fleeing for their lives - from violent pimps or customers. "It will be about three to five beds," she said. "But 20 would be more like it."
Watching the woman in the school-girl masquerade try to change her luck by crossing to a different corner, I wondered how many times she has been beaten up or cut with a knife by a pimp or a john. How old was she when she turned her first trick? How many years - or months - does she have left before her body or mind gives out?
I tried to imagine what the woman looks like in that pitiful outfit when the sun goes down and streetlights obscure all the lines, sores and hollow eyes.
Is she pretty enough for two drunken Russian tourists?
